Archaeology in Practice

A Student Guide to Archaeological Analyses

Jane Balme, Alistair Paterson, Jane Balme, Alistair Paterson

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780470657164
• eBook ISBN: 9781118323830
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This much-enhanced new edition of the highly accessible guide to practical archaeology is a vital resource for students.  It features the latest methodologies, a wealth of case studies from around the world, and contributions from leading specialists in archaeological materials analysis.

• New edition updated to include the latest archaeological methods, an enhanced focus on post-excavation analysis and new material including a dedicated chapter on analyzing human remains
• Covers the full range of current analytic methods, such as analysis of stone tools, human remains and absolute dating
• Features a user-friendly structure organized according to material types such as animal bones, ceramics and stone artifacts, as well as by thematic topics ranging from dating techniques to report writing, and ethical concerns.
• Accessible to archaeology students at all levels, with detailed references and extensive case studies featured throughout

1
Collaborating with Stakeholders

Larry J. Zimmerman and Kelly M. Branam

Introduction

In the first edition of this book, the title of this chapter was “Consulting Stakeholders.” The change to “Collaborating with Stakeholders” for this edition reflects the rapidly changing views of archaeologists in accountability to their many publics. Collaborating is a more comprehensive term, which incorporates everything from notification to full-scale engagement in which stakeholder groups set research agendas, actively interpret results, and sometimes use information from collaborative projects to generate social policy or change relating to their group. Sometimes, archaeologists take an activist role in suggesting possible uses of information and working with a group to implement social change.

This is a far cry from a time when archaeologists sometimes joked that they got into archaeology so they didn't have to deal with living people. The truth is, some archaeologists still do hope to avoid interaction with members of descendent communities or other stakeholder groups and give any number of reasons or excuses. Times have changed, and a lot of archaeologists now fully understand that the past has many stakeholders who may have as much right to the past as archaeologists, and in the case of descendent communities, even more right to it. In fact, the very phrase “the past” may be seen as nothing more than a convenient, generic reference because some archaeologists now understand that there likely are several pasts, all of them capable of explicating a particular set of material remains an archaeologist might find.

Recognition by archaeologists of the rights of these stakeholders and the complexities of the past has taken decades, with no small amount of contention. Pressure to do so came primarily not only from Indigenous people, but also from other descendent communities, starting with demands for the return of human skeletal remains and sacred objects. As they articulated their concerns and anger, their distrust of archaeology and the pasts it generates became abundantly clear. Out of this came additional demands for consultation with descendent community members, which in some cases became part of governmental laws and regulations related to protection of cultural heritage. The result was that by the time archaeology entered the twenty-first century, many archaeologists began to consider consultation with stakeholders to be an important and expected part of their work. Although acceptance of the need for consultation became standard practice, what consultation really meant took time to sort out. A move toward collaboration, essentially a more engaged form of consultation, has been the result.

This chapter will explore some core theoretical and practical aspects of collaboration, that is, direct interaction by archaeologists with other stakeholders in jointly negotiated projects. This chapter may not be what you expect. Unlike some aspects of archaeological methods, collaboration cannot be a set of techniques to apply in standard ways or to “typical” situations. It is not intended to be a primer. To provide a “cookbook” for collaboration actually would be irresponsible and misleading because even within the same culture, descendent communities can be extremely diverse. Please heed this warning: Approaches that work for collaborating with one group may bring disaster with another.

Still, several underlying epistemological (i.e., “how we know what we know”) issues and some practical matters seem to appear with regularity. The practical considerations discussed here also will include some of the primary consultation and collaboration laws, regulations, or policies in the United States, Canada, and Australia, along with a discussion of how collaboration works (or doesn't). Throughout, brief examples will illustrate key points.

What and Who Is an Archaeological Stakeholder?

Stakeholder theory is complex (see Mitchell et al. 1997: 854), but most of us have a basic notion of who or what an archaeological stakeholder might be – an individual, group, or agency with an interest or “stake” in some aspect of the archaeological record. In practice, however, there can be substantially greater complexity, as many archaeologists will tell you. There are concerns with possession of, or rights to, some “property” that is contested, property that will be turned over to the winner of the “contest.” Each stakeholder has resources such as tradition, identity, or money to be committed to the contest and what negotiators call salience, the level of commitment the stakeholder has in pursuing this issue over other issues, essentially how important an issue is to them relative to other concerns. The archaeological record often has multiple stakeholders, all of them contending for archaeological property, whether for artifacts or for control of the very nature of the past and how stories about it get told. To the contest they bring varied resources and salience that range from low levels where they do little more than announce that they are stakeholders to intense contention that might include strong rhetoric, legal action, or even violence.

Stakeholders are varied, with archaeologists themselves being an important group. Many archaeologists have seen themselves as scientific, and therefore objective, parties to these issues, aloof from the “politics” of the past. By the early 1980s, however, there was clearly a disciplinary stake in the past as some scholars saw the repatriation issue as a threat to their access to human remains, grave goods, sacred objects, and data generated from them. Levels of salience increased dramatically as did the resources put to the contest, and some archaeologists went so far as to go to court to stake their claims (e.g., the Kennewick skeleton in the United States – for two views of this case, see Chatters 2001; Thomas 2001; see also the discussion in Chapter 3 of this book).

At the same time, archaeologists underestimated the true salience of Indigenous people regarding the past. In the repatriation issue, for example, many archaeologists thought Indigenous people didn't care about human remains and excavations of traditional sites, mostly because they rarely heard Indigenous people complain. What archaeologists failed to realize was that colonized Indigenous people had a lot of problems with greater immediacy that impinged on their cultural – sometimes even their physical – survival (e.g., land title, health issues, and economy) and very few resources. As those issues abated and some groups were able to increase their resources, saliency about protecting their cultural property and traditions sometimes made them extremely vocal stakeholders, with many seeing their very identities at stake in the stories archaeologists told about Indigenous pasts (Zimmerman 2001; for specific statements by Indigenous peoples, see Langford 1983; Forsman 1997: 109; Tsosie 1997: 66, several papers in Layton 1989, but especially Bielawski 1989).

Seeing Indigenous people and archaeologists as primary stakeholders, however, would be a vast oversimplification. Members of other, non-Indigenous, descendent communities also have a stake in pasts they see as being from their ancestors. Sometimes, descendent communities can even be composed of members of ethnic communities that are part of the dominant society. Contested pasts are sometimes violent, as in the case of the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, India (Romey 2004). There are stakeholder groups beyond those who have a direct cultural or genetic affiliation to a particularly contested past. Passions are equally felt, for example, over the long-term Greek demands for the return of Elgin/Parthenon Marbles (Guardian Unlimited 2009). There are stakeholder groups such as government agencies or developers who are beyond those with a direct cultural or genetic affiliation to a particularly contested past. Some groups, archaeologists among them, even tend to think of the past as a public heritage where everyone has a stake. As cases in point, people from many parts of the world showed great concern about possible damage to archaeological sites from warfare in Iraq and looting of Iraqi museums and sites (Garen 2004) and in early 2011, looting from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (Elkin 2011).

Private citizens can have a stake, particularly when it comes to artifacts. In several countries, the United States most notably, artifacts found on privately held land usually are considered to be the landowner's property (the rare exception being human remains). Even antiquities dealers, collectors, and looters are stakeholders, some making their living directly from acquisition and sales of antiquities. However, public moneys from citizen-paid taxes pay for most archaeological research, and government required-and-paid-for cultural and heritage resources management activities make up the vast majority of all archaeology in several countries. Thus, project managers and government agencies comprise a significant group of stakeholders who make demands about how the archaeology gets done and what happens to materials recovered. Museums and other educational organizations also may have concerns about what happens to archaeological artifacts, especially in their interpretations and presentation. Land developers become stakeholders when heritage sites get in the way of their projects, or in some cases, when archaeological sites may be seen as a positive that increases heritage tourism. Assessing the salience of each stakeholder group can be a serious challenge!

Unfortunately, the very notion of archaeological stakeholders may conjure up a contest that will have winners and losers. For example, the media, some archaeologists, and a few Indigenous people have presented the repatriation issue as some kind of “us versus them,” “archaeologists versus Indigenous,” or “science versus religion” contest in which one group loses. That has been a very limiting and unfortunate way of seeing what and who stakeholders are (Zimmerman 2008a: 189–90). For archaeologists, that certainly is worthy of another warning: Stakeholder groups don't always have to compete and actually can share agendas or form alliances to their mutual benefit.

Stakeholders to the past can be many and varied in agenda, resources, and salience, attributes that must be considered when archaeologists interact with them. Simple, general guidelines for collaboration with stakeholders don't work, so all interaction with stakeholders needs to be carefully planned, but remain flexible enough to handle the idiosyncrasies of each group.

Collaboration Comes in Many Forms

Just as the stakeholders and their interests in the past are many and varied, so too are viewpoints about what collaboration means. Respect is the humblest form of collaboration, but it is necess...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Chapter Abstracts
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• 1 Collaborating with Stakeholders
• 2 Stratigraphy
• 3 Sediments
• 4 Absolute Dating
• 5 Rock Art
• 6 An Introduction to Stone Artifact Analysis
• 7 Ceramics
• 8 Residues and Usewear
• 9 Animal Bones
• 10 Human Remains
• 11 Plant Remains
• 12 Shell Middens and Mollusks
• 13 Artifacts of the Modern World
• 14 Historical Sources
• 15 Writing the Past
• Index
• End User License Agreement